Vikas Gujral, Director & COO, Max Bupa Health InsuranceBangalore: In an interview with ETCIO, Vikas Gujral, Max Bupa Health Insurance’s Director and COO discusses about organizational IT strategy and business operations, the significance of cloud, mobility and information security in digital transformation and much more.

Gujral is responsible for the development and execution of Max Bupa’s operational strategy, service delivery capability and technological automation. He has close to two decades of industry experience and in past he had worked with top organizations including Max Life Insurance, Bharti Airtel and GE Capital.

Edited excerpts...

Q1). Brief us about the overall IT strategy of the organization and its business operations?Max Bupa has strong focus on utilizing the technology to deliver the best in class service and an overwhelming experience to its customers, partners and employees. Max Bupa had made significant investment in its technology capabilities, including in-house development and support team to ensure agility and responsiveness for evolving business needs.

Max Bupa’s IT Strategy rests on 3 key pillars – “Customer Experience” is the first pillar and focuses on excelling in end to end customer experience across touch points. This is the single largest transformation area where we are making strides by leveraging digital and upcoming technology capabilities across various customer and operations areas. Within this area, we are building an omni channel experience for our customers and innovating on how services are delivered and consumer by our customers. This is where we are investing in aggregations, digital ecosystems, compelling channel experience, mobility and other experiential capabilities to differentiate ourselves.

Second pillar is referred to as “Decision Orientation” which indicates our emphasis on analytics based decision making capabilities across multiple areas. We are investing in building analytical capabilities including big data analytics right from customer profiling to product positioning and risk management. This is helping Max Bupa bring technology to the core of all decision making processes and is bringing a unique culture within the organization.

Third pillar is what we refer to as “Safe and Secure” and it refers to all the strengths we are building to our landscape to ensure scalability and sustainability. While we go on to leverage emerging technologies and transform various parts of our operations, we need to ensure security is not missed out. We are making investments in areas of professional infrastructure management to bring in predictability of IT operations, building real time scanning capabilities to secure our landscape in the ever changing digital world.

We have undertaken massive efforts to build security across several layers – perimeter, network, servers, applications, data, information and users. Our idea is to ensure end to end security for operations and automations which is increasingly becoming an imperative for growing enterprises given the concerns around cyber security paradigms. Max Bupa is ensuring we are fully prepared to face the challenges and protect our core IT assets while allowing business to expand seamlessly.

While we continue to make progress on our IT strategy, we are ensuring that Max Bupa IT systems have a robust architecture, are highly scalable and hosted on multi-server Sun and Intel platforms in state of art ISO 27001 compliant datacenters. Max Bupa management has a very clear road map to ensure that the technology stack always maintains its competitive edge.

We have implemented solutions to automate core processes like new business, claims, healthcare provider enrolment, agent licensing, and renewals. These solutions together enhanced customer experience through improved interactions and reduced customer response timelines. We have also enabled some of these key capabilities on mobile platforms and in doing so; Max Bupa became the first insurer in India to introduce a mobility application into its customer acquisition process.

Q2). Which are the key IT or technology enabled initiatives that have been rolled out in recent times?Max Bupa ensures that it is always keeping pace with the development in technology and hence makes continuous investments to maintain an edge over its competition. Max Bupa has recently developed a specialized OTC app for agents, termed as ‘InstaInsure’ which issues a policy almost instantly. The app eases out the otherwise lengthy and time taking procedure of documentation work that was earlier required by the traditional method. In contrast to that, the app also enables an insurance agent to fasten and ease out the documentation work that will save on travel time and help reduce the chances of human errors.

The company also successfully launched ‘SARAL’, an end to end integrated digital sales platform, for our bank assurance partners, which enables instant and hassle free policy issuance for the bank’s customers, over the counter in less than two minutes. The platform allows Max Bupa to reach its partner bank’s walk in customers across branches and create customer delight at the point of sale.

Customer centricity is at the heart of everything that we do. We need to own customer experience end to end - at the point of sale, claim or renewal. It is important to generate trust amongst our target audience group at key moments of truth when they need us the most, especially at the point of claim.

Our endeavor in this direction was to introduce pre authorization of cashless claims within 30 minutes. When the customer has to be admitted in the hospital, we can’t keep him or her waiting. We are trying to ensure that we help our customers in the moment of crisis by make the cashless claims approval process smooth, easy and fast. Today, we process 94% cashless claims within 30 minutes. Over the years, we have strengthened our position as an IT leader in the industry and such initiatives open up gamut of opportunities in enabling new business through innovative and responsive technology.

Q3). To what extent is your organization leveraging cloud computing and mobility technology?Driving efficiency, effectiveness and business growth are top business priorities for insurance companies today. Transitioning to a digital enterprise can help insurers develop new business models to address the disruptive changes occurring in the economic, social and technology environments and drive profitability and growth.

Max Bupa is fully geared up to embrace the upcoming technology advancements especially around digital areas. We are in the process of setting up our own private cloud to reap benefits of scalability and elasticity. We are also investing in innovation pilots around SDN and NFV areas working with our key partners to gauge how the technology is shaping up and how can Max Bupa benefit from it. We are also looking to move towards a hybrid cloud setup sometime in future where for some non core areas we will be using public cloud offerings and gain time to market for some automation, specifically around productivity.

Mobility is a key focus area and we are adapting a “Mobile Also” strategy where we are developing automation on mobile channel for areas such as new business processing and policy issuance. As we go forward, we are committed to understand our customers better and have their interactions across the lifecycle on mobile channel. Overall, I am very excited to use mobility as the channel to innovate customer experience on lines of consumerization.

Q4). Being in the insurance space, how are you dealing with data and cyber security? Can you throw some light in terms of information security mechanism within the organization?We are looking at information security as a critical platform enabling our growth and all business initiatives. In order to ensure all aspects are covered, we have created a robust framework for information security that spans 7 layers where constructs are applied. This is as shown below:

At the moment we are working on various initiatives around information security that includes making a secured infrastructure landscape (with advanced threat protection capabilities) to making secured networks and multi-factor authentication based access mechanisms.

We are also implementing a robust framework for information security that will bring in the desired processes and governance for the same. And lastly, we are looking at data and information level security through DLP and policy controls which provide us real time scanning and decision making abilities for security incidents and events management (SIEM).

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